ENB has announced that HIT Entertainment's dancing mouse, Angelina Ballerina, is to become Production Sponsor of ENB's brand new production of The Nutcracker. The £250,000 cash injection is the largest single sponsorship in ENB's 52 year-history.

The partnership between Angelina and ENB aims to spark childrens' interest in classical ballet, thus encouraging future audiences for the artform.

ENB unveils Christopher Hampson's The Nutcracker in Bristol at the Hippodrome on 10 October 2002. Following performances at the Manchester Opera House and the Mayflower Southampton the Company is to present its annual winter season at 4he London Coliseum. Gerald Scarfe will design sets and costumes.

General booking for the London Christmas season opened on 22 July 2002. Tickets available from the Coliseum Box Office tel 020 7632 8300.

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Principal Casting

Please note that casting is subject to alteration. The characters are in order: Drosselmeyer/Prince/Sugar Plum

Just to remind everyone that ENB's new production of The Nutcracker will shortly be unveiled in Bristol on 10 October. Former Royal Ballet dancer Irek Mukhamedov will dance Drosselmeyer with Agnes Oaks and Thomas Edur as the Sugar Plum Fairy and the Prince.

The London season for the ballet starts on 3 December at the Colisuem with 44 performances until 4 January 2002.

For those of you with children, think about attending one of the matinees (listed above) when Angelina Ballerina will personally introduce audiences to the story of the ballet from the stage before the performance begins.

Article by Gerald Scarfe in The Guardian on his designs for this production.

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I'm not a ballet buff, so when Mats Skoog, the artistic director of English National Ballet, invited me to come up with a new design for The Nutcracker, I had no preconceptions. He told me that he wanted the production to be led by the design - that was what particularly attracted me. I had seen one or two Nutcrackers before, but Skoog encouraged me to begin with a completely clean slate.

IF THERE’S ONE BALLET everyone knows, it’s The Nutcracker. And if there’s one ballet guaranteed to set the box-office tills ringing it’s The Nutcracker. So when a company takes on a new production of the Christmas perennial it had better have something special to say for itself. In the case of English National Ballet’s new staging, which premieres in Bristol on Thursday, that something special is the designs. Sets and costumes by the political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe will give ENB’s production an extravagant new look. But the rethink doesn’t stop there. Christopher Hampson is providing all new choreography, his biggest project to date.

The Nutcracker is sold as the most child friendly ballet in the repertory, yet many kids find its sporadic story line and dance divertissements a mild bore. English National Ballet earn almost half their annual box-office revenue from this classic, so it is not surprising that their new production is geared to snaring the restless attentions of a junior audience. Cartoonist Gerald Scarfe has provided the vision for the production and his designs are as confrontationally eccentric as you'd expect. The characters pop out of a giant story book, styled in a mix of Mervyn Peake and Vivienne Westwood. Clara and her friend are cute jail bait in acrylic wigs and bum-skimming miniskirts, green-haired Grandpa with orange kilt and Zimmer frame has a sex pot called Ms V Agra hanging from his arm. Drosselmeyer, the dominant force of act one, is dressed like Gary Glitter on a day out to the magic circle.

WHEN MATZ SKOOG decided that he needed a new Nutcracker for English National Ballet the first person he approached was Gerald Scarfe. Skoog knew that he wanted the production to be design-led, and he knew that with Scarfe on board the designs would grab all the attention. And that’s precisely what they do. It was hard sometimes on Thursday at the Bristol Hippodrome, where The Nutcracker premiered, to find the ballet lurking within the riot of colour and caricature that Scarfe has conceived.

An artificial snowstorm heralded the first Nutcracker of the season. English National Ballet launched its shiny new production - the twelfth in its 52-year existence - in Bristol, before taking it on tour to Liverpool, Southampton and Manchester. It reaches the London Coliseum in time for Christmas, competing with the Royal Ballet's tried-and-tested Victorian version.

I happened to be watching this programme at lunch time and it showed you behind the scenes at the new Nutcracker , it was intresting especially as they were due to open and the costumes were still being painted!The funniest thing was that the guy introducing it was in tights having a ballet lesson , and he wasn't that bad!! I remember the programme was " Working Lunch " on BBC2..its on Monday to Friday . I don't like the new Drosselmeyer , he looks like a cross between Gary Glitter and Gary Rhodes its a wonder the kids don't have nightmares...either that or they all want gas masks and guns for christmas!! where has all the romance gone..give me the RB production every time.

Ismene Brown reviews The Nutcracker by the English National Ballet currently touring

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Opening nights are notoriously bad representations of what ballet productions will become, so I feel reluctant to judge English National Ballet's expensive new Nutcracker on the strength of its unveiling. Apologies were made from the stage for technical delays, but problems look more deep-seated than that to me.

Sparrows and starlings may be on the decline, but as usual there will be no shortage of Nutcrackers, and the first of the season has just landed. English National Ballet, which holds the British record for half a century of Nutcracking, premiered its latest new-look production at the Bristol Hippodrome, prior to a tour and a Christmas run in London. It turns out a very gaudy affair. The questionable idea of the ENB’s new director, Matz Skoog,was to commission a “design-led” staging from the cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, with the choreography by the talented young Christopher Hampson coming in second place. Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker is a fantasy ballet, but surely, however “modernised”, the fantasy, the magic only work when they grow out of something palpably real to begin with.

Any company toying with the idea of staging a Nutcracker in which the designer is the lead player has two dire warnings before them to contemplate. The Russian illustrator Mikhail Shemiakin's version for the Kirov Ballet (performed this month in Paris) is a self-indulgent disaster, and now here comes English National Ballet's, designed by the illustrious cartoonist Gerald Scarfe.

It might seem like a masterly wheeze to bolster the lop-sided 19th-century story and patchwork choreography with a funky artistic angle, but a big name whose normal habitat is paper or canvas does not necessarily guarantee satisfying theatre. Scarfe has worked for the stage before, but not for ballet; which would be fine, if the results were worth the detour, let alone the journey. But his concept of a giant storybook that comes alive kills the ballet stone dead.

The horse knew what it was doing. ENB, I feel, does not. The Nutcracker has a simple - verging on dim - narrative. No matter: it also has the most ravishing score, an emotional warmth, a pinch of magic, and a generous dance identity. In what we may optimistically think of as its original state, it can charm audiences of all ages, all tastes, by the hints of poetry and the undeniable astuteness of its action. It may be kitsch, but it is kitsch of genius. Many producers have had their wicked way with it during the past three decades, but something of worth usually survives to remind us of its irresistible qualities.

English National Ballet's version at the Coliseum is design-led without much further dimension. Gerald Scarfe's vibrant, confectionery costumes and nursery sets are great fun (particularly the fridge in which the Snowflakes live).

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